Notice to the First Edition (1819)

The work I submit today to the judgement of the public may, in several respects, be regarded as a development of the article “Political Economy” that I contributed to the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia.

When the editors of that immense collection, in which one finds so much learning joined to such noble views, did me the honour of asking me for an article on this science, I accepted, believing I had nothing more to do than set out principles universally admitted and show the point reached by a theory I regarded as settled. I was in fact persuaded that nothing more remained to be done in political economy than to spread, among rulers and among the mass of the people, a doctrine on which theorists seemed to me universally agreed. I had done nothing else in various writings that I had myself published on different occasions, either on the science as a whole or on several of its branches. I sometimes flattered myself that I had set out the system of Adam Smith more clearly, but without adding anything to his ideas, and it did not seem to me that the writers of my own time were bolder than I, or more fortunate in their boldness.

The work I undertook for the Encyclopaedia had to be clear and short. A writer can hope to achieve these two qualities only by following the proper course of his own ideas instead of submitting to anyone else’s. I went back to principles, I drew the consequences from them in my own way, and I began the theory again as though nothing had yet been established. I had recourse to no book, on a subject that had so long been the object of my meditations; I walked alone, hardly distinguishing what I found in my memory from what was the result of fresh reasoning. In this way, without even intending it, I remained entirely free of any systematic authority.

It seems to me that by this method I gained greater precision in setting out the principles I had long regarded as settled; but above all, and this is what struck me most, they led me to very new results. In the more than fifteen years since I had written on Commercial Wealth, I had read very few books of political economy; but I had never ceased to study the facts. Some of them had seemed to me to rebel against the principles I had adopted. Suddenly they seemed to fall into order and explain one another through the new development I was giving my theory. The further I went, the more I was persuaded of the importance and truth of the modifications I was making to the system of Adam Smith. Everything that had until then remained obscure in the science became clear when considered from this new point of view, and my principles gave me the solution of difficulties I had not thought of in advance.

I finished my little piece for the Encyclopaedia, but in it I merely touched lightly on everything that seemed to me new views. Works of that kind must be repositories admitting only the facts and principles on which there is universal agreement. They are a monument raised to the science in its present state, not a scaffolding for pushing it further; all controversy would be out of place in them, and everything that has a particular value for the present moment would be lost there.

I therefore thought it fitting to take up the same treatise again from its foundations, in order to develop by preference what I had only touched upon, and to establish as solidly as I am able what I had only ventured with timidity.

I was keenly moved by the commercial crisis that Europe has gone through in these last years, and by the cruel sufferings of the factory workers, which I had witnessed in Italy, in Switzerland and in France, and which all public reports showed to have been at least as great in England, in Germany and in Belgium. I was persuaded that governments and nations were on the wrong road, and that they were aggravating the distress they were trying to remedy. I had observed with no less painful a feeling the combined efforts of proprietors, legislators and writers to change the systems of cultivation that spread the most happiness through the countryside, and to destroy the comfort of the peasants in the hope of obtaining a greater net product. Rulers and writers alike seemed to me to go astray in the search, now for whatever can most increase wealth, now for whatever can most increase population; whereas each of these, considered in isolation, is only an abstraction, and the true problem of the statesman is to find the combination and proportion of population and wealth that will guarantee the most happiness to the human race on a given territory. On every side I seemed to see good men doing harm, patriots ruining their countries, charitable souls multiplying the poor. Perhaps I shall be accused of presumption for having attacked the opinions of so many men whose knowledge and character I equally honour; but when the science of the public good is at stake, an honest man must not let himself be stopped by any personal consideration. Everything that was barely sketched in my article for the Encyclopaedia seems to me to be placed here in a sufficient light, and I flatter myself that I shall be understood without fatigue. Perhaps better-informed readers will think at first that they are going back along a well-worn rut, since the principles of Adam Smith have constantly served as my guides; yet it is from these principles, with the complement I believe necessary added to them, that they will see very different consequences emerge. I therefore beg them not to lose heart in following me through what will seem to them an exposition of known truths; and I beg them again, when they see these unexpected consequences arrive, not to reject them without examination. I long followed the road on which they now are, and the public seemed to judge, when I published my Commercial Wealth, that if I had made no discoveries along it, at least I had known it well. The reasons that made me abandon opinions I had developed with zeal seem to me to deserve some attention.

I have felt no scruple in inserting word for word into this work the greater part of my article in the Encyclopaedia: it forms about a third of it. Whenever I believed I had expressed my thought clearly, it would have been tedious to look for a new way of saying the same things, and they would no doubt have lost in precision. Besides, since that work was published only in English, I had less feeling, in changing language, of repeating myself. But although that little piece contained the germ of my ideas on the formation of revenue and on the way it must limit consumption, and then production; on the development proper to landed wealth; on the effects of unlimited competition and of the progress of machinery; and finally on the natural limits of population, which Mr Malthus seems to me to have misunderstood, it is only here that I have dared to give these ideas the development of which they seem to me capable, and to show their important applications to the science charged with watching over the happiness of the human race.